In the design of communications systems, there is generally a compromise between bit error rate (BER) and transmission bit rate. Higher bit rates tend to have higher BERs. A well-known limit on capacity of a communications channel is the Shannon Limit. In practice, where forward error correction (FEC) is used, the Shannon Limit is a theoretical boundary on channel capacity for a given modulation and code rate, where the code rate is the ratio of data bits to total bits transmitted per unit time. FEC coding adds redundancy to a message by encoding such a message prior to transmission. Some example error correction codes include Hamming, Bose-Chaudhuri-Hochquenghem (BCH), Reed-Solomon (RS), Viterbi, trellis, etc.
For high-speed communication applications, parallel processing may be needed to meet throughput requirements. One approach to parallelize Reed-Solomon encoding implements multiple instances of the standard encoder, and each instance decodes a separate data block or data channel. Another approach modifies the standard Reed-Solomon encoder to process multiple data blocks of multiple data channels in a time-division-multiplexed (TDM) fashion. Neither of these approaches is desirable because the former solution increases hardware requirements linearly as the number of channels increases, and the latter solution increases latency of the encoding.
One or more embodiments may address one or more of the above issues.